ts with an
unnatural enthusiasm. Then he left Thun for foreign countries, and was
gone two or three years, and returned with an accumulation of various
specimens in almost every department of natural science: with
note-books, herbariums, cabinets, strange animals stuffed to resemble
life, birds, fishes, petrifactions--in short, the air, the water, and
the earth had furnished their quota to satisfy his feverish zeal for
acquisition. He was still a young man, scarce five-and-twenty, yet he
bore the appearance of a person at least forty years old--"

"But the cause of this strange metamorphose?"

"No one pretends to tell," continued Josephine. "There is a report--and
my father, who, I am sure, knows all, does not contradict it--that Paul
Lindhorst was attached to a young girl who resided in the same town, and
that his affection was returned. On one occasion, a detachment of French
soldiers was quartered in Thun for a short time, and a sub-lieutenant,
who had in some way been made acquainted with her, was smitten with the
charms of the pretty Swiss. I suppose, like some of her sex, she had a
spice of coquetry in her composition, and now, possessing two lovers,
she had a good opportunity to practise it. Paul Lindhorst, however, was
of too earnest a nature to bear this new conduct from the dearest object
of his heart with composure, neither was it his disposition to suffer in
silence. He remonstrated, and was laughed at; he showed signs of deep
dejection, and these marks of a wounded spirit were treated with
thoughtless levity or indifference; he became indignant, and they
quarrelled. It is quite the old story; the girl, half in revenge, half
from a fancied liking for her new lover, married him: soon the order for
march came, and, by special permission, she was permitted to accompany
her husband, as the regiment was to be quartered in France, and not to
go on active service. Such," continued Josephine Fluellen, "is the story
which I have heard repeated, and to which was attributed the
extraordinary change in the young physician. His devotion to his
favorite pursuits continued to engross him, he grew more abstracted,
more laborious, more unremitting in his vocation. Again he visited
foreign lands, and was gone another three years. Returning, he brought,
in addition to his various collections, a little bright-eyed,
brown-haired child, a girl, some four years old; and taking her to his
house, which he still retained, he made ar